Move over, Microsoft Kinect. Panasonic said Tuesday that it will begin building in speech recognition into future televisions and other consumer electronics devices.

In addition, the CE giant also said that it would begin putting the Flixster application on Panasonic's Viera Connect devices including HDTVs and Blu-ray players, allowing users to tap into their UltraViolet content.

Panasonic said that it had licensed a large-vocabulary speech library from Novauris, which co-developed the NovaLite speech recognition software product for use with Panasonic, and to license to other TV and CE makers who wish to build in speech recognition. NovaLite will be available this quarter, Novauris said.

Novauris didn't say when the speech recognition would be included on Panasonic TVs and other CE devices. A Novauris representative also said in an email that Nouvauris would be working with another "very large Asian CE and mobile device manufacturer," but not who or when.

Languages supported include American and British English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French and Canadian French, Italian, Castilian, Mexican Spanish and German. The NovaLite software can run on Android, iOS and Linux.

To date, of course, speech recognition has been prominently featured on two popular products: Microsoft's Kinect add-on for its Xbox console, as well as Siri, which powers the Apple iPhone S. A video demonstration of the Novauris technology running on a smartphone showed it able to look up contacts, dial numbers, and find addresses, although manual confirmation was needed in some cases.

While Siri was developed by DARPA, via SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center, Novauris' pedigree isn't bad, either: the company was founded by James Baker, who founded speech recognition company Dragon Systems.

Panasonic also strck a partnership with Ooyala, which pushes content to connected devices. The Country Network (TCN) announced a parnership with Panasonic that will push country music content to devices equipped with the Viera Connect technology.

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Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, require... See Full Bio

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